Adorno misread a routine room hunt as a deliberate occupation attempt.

Evidence

On 31 January 1969 Adorno saw several dozen students from the window of his corner office at the Institute walking round the corner at speed and disappearing into the Institute building. He at once concluded that they intended to occupy it. The students had gone to the Sociology Department, now under `modified reoccupation’, and found it shut, so they had been looking for a room in which to hold a discussion at the Institute, without any further aims whatsoever. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 667

Categorization

• SHARE: The farce of Adorno summoning police against students who only wanted a discussion room is a niche bit worth relaying to someone deep in Frankfurt School lore.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on how paranoid institutional reading of gesture produces the confrontation it fears.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno and Marcuse broke partly over secondhand misreadings of Marcuse’s positions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2596
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno and Marcuse broke partly over secondhand misreadings of Marcuse’s positions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2596